Nationality: United StatesExecutive summary: First Governor of Mississippi Territory

The American solder and governor Winthrop Sargent was born in Gloucester, Massachusetts, on 1 May, 1753 and died near New Orleans on 3 June 1820. He was graduated at Harvard, and in 1771 became captain of a ship belonging to his father, who was a merchant. In 1775 he entered the Revolutionary army, and was naval agent at Gloucester, 1 January, 1776, and captain of General Henry Knox's regiment of artillery, 16 March 1776, serving throughout the war, and taking part in the siege of Boston, the battles of Long Island, White Plains, Trenton, the Brandywine, Germantown, and Monmouth, attaining the rank of major. He became connected with the Ohio company in 1786, under General Rufus Putnam, and was appointed surveyor of the Northwest territory by Congress. He was its secretary in 1787, and was its first Governor in 1798-1801. During the Indian wars in 1791 and in 1794-5 he became adjutant-general, and was wounded in the expedition under General Arthur St. Clair. He was a member of the American academy of arts and sciences, and of the Philosophical society, an original member of the Society of the Cincinnati as a delegate from Massachusetts, and published, with Benjamin B. Smith, Papers Relative to Certain American Antiquities (Philadelphia, 1796), and Boston, a poem (Boston, 1803.)